Naruo at work at his former home in Washington DC.

Almost 40 years after leaving his home in ancient Dayan town, Lijiang in Southwest China's Yunnan province, Wang Rongchang's Mandarin still has pronounced traces of his native tongue.

The dark-skinned 61-year-old speaks little English, even after spending 14 years in the United States. To his foreign friends, he is better known by his Naxi name, Naruo. The Naxi are a sect of the ancient Qiang ethnic group, whose kingdom lasted in present-day Southwest China from the 8th century till 1274.

This retired art teacher from the Beijing-based Minzu University of China, places ancient Naxi pictographs, that are still in use today, with concrete images, set against the abstract ideographs of the Han, giving his drawings their own unique language. Using vivid colors, he brings alive the lives of generations of Naxi.

In the painting, A Red-beaked Bird beside the Pond, Naruo applies the Naxi pictograph for bird - a white water fowl - to rivers and mountains with a touch of Song Dynasty (960-1279) landscapes, giving his paintings a hallucinatory feel. The sun shines on the white river. The striking color of Phoebus, mountains and trees painted with bold strokes, alludes to the innocent past of the Naxi people.

Naruo's paintings have been exhibited around the world, but he cares little for fame and fortune, saying, "The purpose of my creativity is to sustain the culture of my people in a rapidly modernizing world."

Since retiring in 2008 from China's top academy for ethnic studies, he has been occupied mainly with painting, based on more than 200 figure sketches he drew before arriving in Beijing decades ago.

His subjects wear traditional Naxi clothes and tranquil expressions, and are placed in a rural setting. His paintings work as a historical document as many of the traditions depicted have disappeared and few young Naxi people speak the language or wear traditional clothes.

"I drew the people after living with them for two months, so I had enough time to watch and understand them," he says.

He is pained to see Chinese society turn so materialistic and hopes, "people will realize the sorrow in their hearts one day and turn to real art". That will be the time his works will appreciate in value, he says.

He is happy to live on the pension he draws from the university. "An artist has to live in a relatively tough environment, or he loses the driving force for creation," he says.

Besides recording Naxi history via his paintings, Naruo has wanted to compile Naxi pictographs ever since he studied art at Minzu University, from 1972 to 1975. "The sources were so limited at the time. So, I wanted go to America, where Austrian-American explorer Joseph Rock's collection of 3,342 original Naxi manuscripts is housed in the Library of Congress."

He landed in Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, in 1986. In 1989, he moved to Washington DC. "When I first saw Rock's manuscript in the library, I knew I was very close to my dream," Naruo says.

Rock spent 24 years in Southwest China from the 1920s to the 1940s and was enthralled by Naxi culture. His collection of Naxi manuscripts is believed to be the largest outside China.